Ain't It Cool SHORTS

Hello ladies and gentlemen, Muldoon here with the second ever screening of "Ain't It Cool News SHORTS," your very own film festival every Saturday here at AICN. I’ve gathered what I consider to be some damn good shorts created by you, the amazingly kickass readers of AICN. If you liked the shorts last week, then you're in for a lovely treat today OR if you hated all of the shorts from last week... I don't want to know you, so turn around and Run! Run away! This week we’ve got everything from explosiviely badass and violent 80's era goodness to an insanely funny comedy.

As always if by chance you submitted a short to me and don’t see it below, fear not, I very well might have it planned to hit the magical Ain't It Cool News SHORTS screen next week. OR if you have a short that you think the fine readers of AICN should check out, here’s how to submit:

Shoot me an email at "Mike@aintitcool.com"

In the subject line include:

“SHORTS” + “Your film’s name” + “The film’s genre”

Then, in the body of the email, please include a synopsis of the film and any contact information you might think I need [EX: the film’s website or a funny story involved with getting the film made…] (You can find my original call for shorts here)

Please, please, please follow the criteria for the subject line above, so no "Short for you to check out" or "Here's my short." I'm sure I sound like a jerk, but it REALLY makes it trickier on my end when you don't. Please don’t feel the need to submit multiple times. I swear to each of you I truly check every email I get, and sending the same short a few times just makes it a bit messier.

I did get a few emails from readers telling me it took forever for last week's page to load, so I'm trying something new this week with breaking them up (two per page). While that's not at all how I want to do the shorts, I also don't want folks out there with slow connections to miss out. So grab some popcorn, silence your cell phones, and please remember the creators of the shorts just might be in the row in front of or behind you, so after the screening remember to keep your manners about you. If you perhaps didn’t care for a short, that’s okay, it’s your opinion and you can absolutely express that. However, being a jerk about something really isn’t cool and doesn’t have a place here. So ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats so we can begin the program.

Let's kick this off with an explosion or two: I present to you BLOOD FROM A STONE by Bill Palmer.

BLOOD FROM A STONE

Dir. Bill Palmer

Genre: 80's Action Comedy

TRT: 8:21

"When renegade cop Sean Sharpstone gets behind the wheel of his t-top Camaro, rules, consequences and ethical behavior take a backseat to looking good, kicking ass and spitting one-liners in this tongue-in-cheek homage to "Fascist Action" films of the 1980's. You've been invited to sit shotgun."

Holy hell what a fun ride. The film's star, Matt Iseman, embodies everything you could ask for from an 80's badass and the style is oddly unique. Just poking around Bill's vimeo account, I found a pretty interesting mini-companion piece to this short (RIDING SHOTGUN) where he used a Go Pro camera and mounted it onto a shotgun... It's actually impressive in its own right. Please go the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN route and get a feature out of this!!!

Up next is EVOLUTIONARIES.

EVOLUTIONARIES

Dir. Fraser Croall & Gary Dewar

Genre: Animation

TRT: 2:25

"Evolutionaries is an animated action adventure series, set far in the future, on Planet Earth as you have never seen it before.

The Human race is long gone – but to where? Evolved Animals and the forgotten Robots - servants of man, have inherited the Earth and new civilisations flourish amongst the wastelands of humanity. But Earth is a fragile place and warriors, both animal and robot, seek to dominate the other and take control of the planet once and for all.

Now Pan the Simian, Non the Robot, Tyton the Owl and Asad the Mighty Lion must unite. Their missions; to solve the riddle of the missing human race, summon help from beyond the stars and bring peace to Planet Earth!"

Still, nice seeing it here, too, nonetheless. It only has like 500 views in seven months. Hopefully Muldoon will keep the ball rolling here. Good column. It's crazy that the "Now you've just got lefts" line hasn't been in anything else before. Seems so obvious, but it's so good.
Evolutionaries is a pretty huge accomplishment, too. Couldn't imagine the amount of work that went into that. Well done filmmakers. Well done Muldoon.

If it doesn't get in at all, is there a chance you didn't see it or will you have checked out all submissions? I made a gory werewolf short in London that has had a great reception which I think would be perfect for the site but has not been up on either of the articles.

Hey man, thanks for shooting me your short! Since I'm one person watching hundreds of shorts and only have put up about 12 or so, I'd ask that you hold off from resubmitting. I can however tell you I know exactly what film your talking about and it kicks ass...

Blood Stone was alright. Felt more like a trailer than a short. The narration kept going and going didn't leave room for any story telling. The thing I liked most about it was that it reminded me of "They Live". Dial the tone down a bit and I think it could be just as badass as "They Live".
Honey Moon I felt was too short. I am interested in seeing a full feature of it. Maybe something similar to "Heavy Metal". The device is received by other users and they experience some bizarre madness from it. Reminded me of steam punk "Strange Days". Anything related to time travel/alternate dimensions I love.
The Evolutionaries was entertaining enough though kind of gave me motion sickness. The audio needs to be remixed in my opinion. The dialogue had too much of a "hall" FX. A bit distracting to me. It had a well thought out plot and has a lot of potential for expanding their adventure.

Only one joke fell flat for me. I can see the criticism of people not seeing as a feature, but duh, it's a short. I'd love to see this done into a full length feature. You would probably get the details of the plot and more graphic violance.
That being said Muldoon has come up with one of the best segments this site has to offer. I wanna go out and shoot something now just to submit. If anything it will get watched by the Muldoon himself.

Probably just me skimming too much, but it's rare to see an AICN article spill out onto two separate pages, so I guess I wasn't looking for it. Didn't realize there was more than three vids posted until I read the talkback. Anyone else have that issue?
I love the column...but wonder if there's a way to keep it on one page without quite as slow a load time? Eh...whatever. Glad this exists.

the vibe i got from that was straight out of early 80's saturday morning tv...before it became just commercials for lousy plastic toys....
It sort of rifs a bit from Thundar the barbarian..but that might just be the whole pseudo appocolypse thing....dunno....all i know is that i thought the idea had TONS of potential, and that i loved the mystery of it....
I'd love to see that story line developed...

Hey guys, whether you liked it or not, thanks much for checking out my short, "Blood from a Stone", and giving some feedback here. It pretty much made my month to be critiqued in a talkback. And obviously, huge thanks to Muldoon for doing this column in the first place. It's gotta be a lot of work to watch all the submissions that roll in, but it's insanely cool that he's trying to give some new people a little recognition here at AICN, instead of just telling us to choke down some exclusive footage from the new McG movie. I think I'm in love.
Anyway, in light of this post, I skipped my final pass at color correction and uploaded my new short today. I know this would have been more relevant 12 hours ago, but oh well. The short is called "Vicki," and it's an homage to John Carpenter's adaptation of Stephen King's "Christine." If that sounds interesting to you, here's the link...
http://vimeo.com/36199414

It was part of this Philips cinema project thing. Some of the other films submitted to that were pretty good, too. I'm assuming they all had to feature certain dialogue, a unicorn and a gun? People got really creative with it. Nice.